In Defence of the Faith Ill.—Providence and Free Will T HERE
are controversies which flame so fiercely that they burn themselves out, not because a solution has been -found but because, in despair of- an answer, men ask at least for silence. I do not suppose that we are much nearer understanding the question of Providence and Free Will than our forefathers, but we have become -tired of their battle and have called a truce. It is fashionable. to say.that there is no solution of the question accessible to us and to dismiss it with the inevitable reference to the devils who discussed it- in Milton's Hell.
Certainly; it -is well to acquiesce in ultimate mysteries ; certainly it is well to shut out (at least from wide, public disputes) speculations which really lead nowhere and have no possible effect on practical life. But on what grounds is the problem before us to be so treated ? Acquiescence in the eternal and unalterable decrees of God has had far-spread effects on peoples and individuals; we have only to think of the Mohammedan Kismet, the Buddhist doctrine of Karma and such Calvinist teaching as that of Edwards that we ought to be " willing to be damned for the glory of God." On the other side, when belief in the freedom of human achievement has run riot, and " special Providences " have been dismissed as a superstition, God's government of the world has not actually been reduced to amiable anarchy. Even in our own personal lives, it cannot be unimportant to ask of anything that happens in us : Is this God or myself, Divine Grace or an uprush from the subliminal? I am not, of course, in this article offering an answer to these questions ; I am saying that these old riddles are living riddles, though they suggest themselves to us in new and different terms.
We can no longer think of God's Providence and of Man's Free Will as in complete antithesis ; -if God sits on a distant throne with a map before Him, on which each future event is inscribed, and man runs about here and there at the mercy of every accident of nature and caprice of his own, then the two pictures cannot stand together ; one or the other must go ; either God is a solemn impostor or man is an inflated puppet.- But from both sides influences- have been long at work to modify this contrast. On the one hand, we no longer think of God as watching the course of history from heaven, as a spectator in the stalls might watch a drama ; we see Him in the midst of the struggle, suffering and rejoicing, just where the battle is hardest, immanent in His Christ.
On the other side, what of man's- freedom " to do what he likes " Who still believes in that ? Not we, obsessed by the racial antagonisms that drive nations to war, whether they will or not, by the historical heritage that shapes and guides the individual, by the mysterious half-conscious promptings that come from us, and yet are not of us.
A world full of power and man in the grip of that Power (whether friendly or hostile), so we tend to look at things in our day, and so we come to think of History as an interaction between that Power and our own wills, and we love the phrase of St. Paul, in which he calls us " fellow-workers with God." But phrases of this kind, which make use of the metaphor of co-operation, easily as they come to our lips, must not suggest the picture of an elder. brother taking a child by the hand and facing the unknown terrors of the -dark -with him, or of Jesus desperately appealing to us for our help to deal with -a situation that has got out of hand. Christian experience can tolerate no such language. If we correct such a picture ; if we start by saying :
" God doth not need Either man's work or his own gifts . . . His state Is kingly,"
if we believe that it is His Infinite Condescension which has made us and deigns to make use of us, letting His purposes seem to depend on us for a brief moment and yet never letting us baffle His gracious- counsels, can we still use the language of co-operation, and say that in order to train us, as " fellow-workers," He puts off His omnipotence in one small region of His Kingdom and waits patiently on our bungling attempts to manage ?
Such is the picture which, I suppose, comes most readily to our minds, and which we most love to cherish ; for most of us, most of the time, it serves all the purposes of truth, yet there are warnings in Christian thought that, after all, it is but a picture. Three considerations especi- ally help to drive us beyond it towards the 'mystery behind-; I shall close the little that I can say in one article by just referring to them.
The first is the fact that God is the Creator of all things and of all souls ; when we speak of His Providence we do not mean some miraculous power of second-sight, or of being in two times at once, here with us and far away in the future ; we mean simply that all that happens is from God. Professor Eddington has told us that " Phy- sics is no longer pledged to a scheme of deterministic law" and the Christian rejoices, but, though we may leave room'for accident in the universe, we cannot regard the universe as itself an accident. St. Paul laid down the prin- ciple of Christian theology when he said that for Christians " all things work together for good." This sense of being surrounded by God's mercies does not stop outside our souls. In them, too, we feel the breath of His power and the whisper of His will. Partnership seems a poor word for a companionship, of which we can say, " Whither can I go then from Thy Presence ? " for " in Him, we live and move and have our being."
Secondly, the highest experience of our race makes us hesitate about using the language of eo-operation. The mystics feel themselves claimed and carried away by a Love they cannot resist ; a Power not their own takes them prisoners into a captivity, which is yet the highest freedom. The note that is heard in the " Hound of Heaven " is not the offer of an ally, but the demand of surrender to a captor ; even in Our Lord Himself, as we watch His free and perfect obedience, we feel less the agreement of two wills than the invasion of the human by the Divine. Hence our 'difficulty, as we look at the Temptation or at Gethsemane, in saying " He could have resisted His Father's Will." If our own experiences are far more humble, we need not be restless, only resolve not to measure God's ways-by our little foot-rules.
Thirdly, we come up, in the long run, against the darkest and gladdest of all facts—God's eternity. We have spoken of Him as acting in history, and yet the deepest spiritual thought has not held that God had a history. He has no past from which He is developing into some emergent future ; He does not belong to the world where things grow and decay ; He is. So, the question of Providence and Free- Will changes into the question of time and eternity. How can God who works and has a plan in time, yet be eternally unchange- able ? How can the time process be real, and yet all things already perfect in Him ? I cannot here enter on such high problems. Let me close with one thought.
Not so very long ago, it was fashionable to regard time as an ultimate thing ; it was held that to be is to happen."-- -We- are far- more doubtful- now ; time seems less solid than it did ; strange experiences seem--to teach that the past (or even that the future) is accessible. Professor Eddington is puzzled by the direction of time's arrow, and wonders why it does not run backwards. If time be relative, to what is it relative ? What is the absolute behind and beyond these moments that gallop so mysteriously along ? If we could begin to answer that we should, perhaps, have a glimpse of the relation between God's Providence and Man's Free Will.
F. II. BRABANT.
Next Week we shall publish the fourth article in this second series, In Defence of the Faith, " Christianity and the Beyond," by Dr. Edwyn Bevan. Previous articles have been" The Modern Outlook in Theology," by the Bishop of Gloucester, and " The Modern Attitude to the Bible," by Canon Vernon Starr, of Westminster.
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